Showing posts with label Discovery Channel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Discovery Channel. Show all posts

Sunday 18 March 2018

Smart phone, dumb people: is technology really reducing our intelligence?

IQ testing is one of those areas that always seems to polarise opinion, with many considering it useful for children as long as it is understood to be related to specific areas of intelligence rather than a person's entire intellectual capabilities. However, many organisations, including some employers, use IQ tests as a primary filter, so unfortunately it cannot be ignored as either irrelevant or outdated. Just as much of the education system is still geared towards passing exams, IQ tests are seen as a valid method to sort potential candidates. They may not be completely valid, but are used as a short-cut tool that serves a limited purpose.

James Flynn of the University of Otago in New Zealand has undertaken long-term research into intelligence, so much so that the 'Flynn Effect' is the name given to the worldwide increase in intelligence since IQ tests were developed over a century ago. The reasons behind this increase are not fully understood, but are probably due to the complex interaction of numerous environmental factors such as enriched audio-visual stimulation, better - and more interactive - education methods, even good artificial lighting for longer hours of reading and writing. It is interesting that as developing nations rapidly gain these improvements to society and infrastructure, their average IQ shows a correspondingly rapid increase when compared to the already developed West and its more staid advancement.

Research suggests that while young children's IQ continues to increase in developed nations, albeit at a reduced rate, the intelligence of teenagers in these countries has been in slow decline over the past thirty years. What is more, the higher the income decile, the larger the decrease. This hints that the causes are more predominant in middle-class lifestyles; basically, family wealth equates to loss of IQ! Data for the UK and Scandinavian countries indicates that a key factor may be the development of consumer electronics, starting with VCRs, games consoles and home computers and now complemented by smart phones, tablets and social media. This would align with the statistics, since the drop is highest among children likely to have greatest access to the devices. So could it be true that our digital distractions are dumbing us down?

1) Time

By spending more time on electronic devices, children live in a narrower world, where audio-visual stimulation aims for maximum enjoyment with minimal effort, the information and imagery flying by at dizzying speed. This isn't just the AV presentation of course: digital content itself closely aligns to pop cultural cornerstones, being glamorous, gimmicky, transient and expendable. As such, the infinitesimally small gradations of social status and friendship that exist amongst children and teenagers requires enormous effort on their part to maintain a constant online presence, both pro-actively and reactively responding to their peers' (and role models') endless inanities.

The amount of effort it would take to filter this is mind-boggling and presumably takes away a lot of time that could be much better spent on other activities. This doesn't have to be something as constructive as reading or traditional studying: going outdoors has been shown to have all sorts of positive effects, as described in Richard Louv's 2005 best-seller Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder.

Studies around the world have shown that there are all sorts of positive effects, including on mood, by mere immersion in nature, not just strenuous physical activity. Whether humans have an innate need for observing the intricate fractal patterns of vegetation (grass lawns and playing fields have been found to be ineffective) or whether it's noticing the seemingly unorganised behaviour of non-human life forms, the Japanese government have promoted Shinrin-yoku or 'forest air bathing' as a counterbalance to the stresses of urbanised existence. It sounds a bit New Age, but there is enough research to back up the idea that time spent in the natural environment can profoundly affect us.

Meanwhile, other nations appear to have given in, as if admitting that their citizens have turned into digitally-preoccupied zombies. Last year, the Dutch town of Bodegraven decided to reduce accidents to mobile-distracted pedestrians by installing red and green LED strips at a busy road junction, so that phone users could tell if it was safe to cross without having to look up!

2) Speed

One obvious change in the past four decades has been in the increased pace of life in developed nations. As we have communication and information retrieval tools that are relatively instantaneous, so employers expect their workforce to respond in tune with the speed of these machines. This act-now approach hardly encourages in-depth cogitation but relies upon seat-of-the-pants thinking, which no doubt requires a regular input of caffeine and adrenaline. The emphasis on rapid turnaround, when coupled with lack of patience, has led to an extremely heavy reliance on the first page of online search results: being smart at sifting through other people's data is fast becoming a replacement for original thought, as lazy students have discovered and no doubt as many school teachers and university lecturers could testify.

Having a convenient source of information means that it is easier for anyone to find a solution to almost anything rather than working something out for themselves. This can lead to a decline in initiative, something which separates thought leaders from everyone else. There is a joy to figuring out something, which after all is a key motivation for many STEM professionals. Some scientists and engineers have explained that being able to understand the inner workings of common objects was a key component of their childhood, leading to an obvious career choice. For example, New Zealand-based scientist and science communicator Michelle Dickinson (A.K.A. Nanogirl) spent her childhood dismantling and repairing such disparate household items as home computers and toasters, echoing Ellie Arroway, the heroine in Carl Sagan's novel Contact, who as a child repaired a defective valve radio before going on to become a radio astronomer.

Of course, these days it would be more difficult to repair contemporary versions of these items, since they are often built so that they cannot even be opened except in a machine shop. Laptops and tablets are prime examples and I've known cases where the likes of Microsoft simply replace rather than repair a screen-damaged device. When I had a desktop computer I frequently installed video and memory cards, but then how-to videos are ubiquitous on YouTube. The latest generation of technology doesn't allow for such do-it-yourself upgrades, to the manufacturer's advantage and the consumer's detriment. As an aside, it's worrying that so many core skills such as basic repairs or map navigation are being lost; in the event of a massive power and/or network outage due to the likes of a solar flare, there could be a lot of people stuck in headless chicken mode. Squawk!

3) Quality

While the World Wide Web covers every subject imaginable (if being of immensely variable quality), that once fairly reliable source of information, television, has largely downgraded the sometimes staid but usually authoritative documentaries of yesteryear into music promo-style pieces of infotainment. Frequently unnecessary computer graphics and overly-dramatic reconstructions and voice overs are interwoven between miniscule sound bites from the experts, the amount of actual information being conveyed reduced to a bare minimum.

In many cases, the likes of the Discovery Channel are even disguising pure fiction as fact, meaning that children - and frequently adults - are hard-placed to differentiate nonsense from reality. This blurring of demarcation does little to encourage critical or even sustained thinking; knowledge in the media and online has been reduced to a consumer-led circus with an emphasis on marketing and hype. Arguably, radio provides the last media format where the majority of content maintains a semblance of sustained, informative discussion on STEM issues.

4) Quantity

The brave new world of technology that surrounds us is primarily geared towards consumerism; after all, even social media is fundamentally a tool for targeted marketing. If there's one thing that manufacturers do not want it is inquisitive customers, since the buzzwords and hype often hide a lack of quality underneath. Unfortunately, the ubiquity of social media and online news in general means that ridiculous ideas rapidly become must-have fads.

Even such commodities as food and drink have become mired with trendy products like charcoal-infused juice, unpasteurised milk and now raw water, attracting the same sort of uncritical punters who think that nutrition gurus know what really constituted human diets in the Palaeolithic. The fact that some of Silicon Valley's smartest have failed to consider the numerous dangers of raw water shows that again, analytical thinking is taking a back seat to whatever is the latest 'awesome' and 'cool' lifestyle choice.

Perhaps then certain types of thinking are becoming difficult to inculcate and sustain in our mentally vulnerable teenagers due to the constant demands of consumerism and its oh-so-seductive delivery channels. Whether today's youth will fall into the viewing habits of older generations, such as the myriad of 'food porn' shows remains to be seen; with so much on offer, is it any wonder people spend entire weekends binge watching series, oblivious to the wider world?

The desire to fit into a peer group and not be left behind by lack of knowledge about some trivia or other, for example about the latest series on Netflix, means that so much time is wasted on activities that only require a limited number of thought processes. Even a good memory isn't required anymore, with electronic calendars and calculators among the simplest of tools available to replace brain power. Besides which, the transience in popular culture means there's little need to remember most of what happened last week!

Ultimately, western nations are falling prey to the insular decadence well known from history as great civilisations pass their prime. Technology and the pace of contemporary life dictated by it must certainly play a part in any decline in IQ, although the human brain being what it is - after all, the most complex object in the known universe - I wouldn't dare guess how much is due to them.

There are probably other causes that are so familiar as to be practically invisible. Take for instance background noise, both visual and aural, which permeates man-made environments. My commute yesterday offers a typical example of the latter sort, with schoolchildren on my train playing loud music on their phones that could be heard some metres away to the two building sites I walked by, plus a main road packed with vehicles up to the size of construction trucks. As a final bonus, I passed ten shops and cafes that were all playing loud if inane pop music that could be heard on the street, through open doors. Gone are the days of tedious elevator muzak: even fairly expensive restaurants play material so fast and loud it barely constitutes the term 'background music'. If such sensory pollution is everywhere, when do we get to enjoy quality cogitation time?

If you think that consumerism isn't as all-encompassing as I state, then consider that the USA spends more per year on pet grooming than it does on nuclear fusion research. I mean, do you honestly really need a knee-high wall-mounted video phone to keep in touch with your dog or cat while you're at work? Talking of which, did you know that in 2015 the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform's Exploding Kittens card game raised almost US$9 million in less than a month? Let's be frank, we've got some work to do if we are to save subsequent generations from declining into trivia-obsessed sheeple. Baa!

Monday 30 January 2017

Hold the back page: 5 reasons science journalism can be bad for science

Although there's an extremely mixed quality to television science documentaries these days (with the Discovery Channel firmly at the nadir) - and in stark contrast to the excellent range of international radio programmes available - the popular press bombards us daily with news articles discussing science and technology. Both traditional print and online publications reach an enormous percentage of the public who would never otherwise read stories connected to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Therefore these delivery channels and the journalists who write material for them face an immense challenge: how to make science accessible and comprehensible as well as interesting. How well they are doing can be judged by the general public's attitude towards the subject...which is currently not that great.

In November 2016 Oxford Dictionaries stated that their Word of the Year was 'post-truth', which refers to 'circumstances in which objective facts are less influential...than appeals to emotion and personal belief.' Clearly, this is the antithesis of how good science should proceed. Combined with the enormous output from social media, which gives the impression that anyone's opinion is as valid as a trained professionals and you can see why things aren't going well for critical thought in general. Did you know that a Google search for 'flat earth' generates over 12 million results? What a waste of everyone's time and data storage! As they said about Brexit: pride and prejudice has overcome sense and sensibility. Here then are five reasons why popular science journalism, mostly covering general news publications but occasionally dipping into specialist magazines too, can be detrimental to the public's attitude towards science.

1) Most science writers on daily newspapers or non-specialist periodicals don't have any formal science training. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once pointed out that journalists have a tendency to read summaries rather than full reports or scientific papers, thus distancing themselves from the original material before they even write about it. The problem is that an approach that works for the humanities may not be suitable for science stories. We're not critiquing movies or gourmet cuisine, folks!

As an humorous example of where a lack of research has led to a prevalent error,  a 1984 April Fools' Day spoof research paper by American journalism student Diana ben-Aaron was published in 350 newspapers before the original publisher admitted that Retrobreeding the Woolly Mammoth was phoney. One of the facts that ben-Aaron made up (and still remains unknown) is that woolly mammoth had fifty-eight chromosomes. This number is now ubiquitous across the World Wide Web from Wikipedia to the Washington Post, although I'm pleased to see that the National Geographic magazine website correctly states the situation. Clearly, anyone who follows the President Trump approach that "All I know is what's on the Internet" isn't going to get the correct answer.

This isn't to say that even a scientifically-trained journalist would understand stories from all sectors: the pace of advance in some fields is so fast than no-one can afford the time to maintain a sophisticated understanding of areas beyond their own specialism. But it isn't just particular research that is a concern: general concepts and methodology can be ignored or misunderstood; whilst a lack of mathematical training can easily restrict an understanding of how statistics work, with error bars and levels of significance often overlooked or misrepresented.

Related to this ambiguity and margin for error, journalists love to give definitive explanations, which is where there can be serious issues. Science is a way of finding ever more accurate explanations for the universe, not a collection of unchangeable laws (excepting the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of course). Therefore today's breakthrough may be reversed by tomorrow's report of sample contamination, unrepeatable results or other failure. It's rarely mentioned that scientists are willing to live with uncertainty - it's a key component of the scientific enterprise, after all. Yet in the event of an about turn or setback it's usually the scientists involved who get blamed, with accusations ranging from wasting public money to taking funding from something more worthwhile. Meanwhile, the journalist who wrote the original distorted account rarely gets held responsible. As for the one-sided scare stories such as nicknaming GM crops as 'Frankenfoods', this lowers what should be a serious public debate to an infantile level extremely difficult to overthrow.

2) How many science documentaries have you seen where the narrator says something along the lines of “and then the scientists found something that stunned them”? Such is the nature of story-making today, where audiences are deemed to have such short attention spans that every five minutes they require either a summary of the last ten minutes or a shock announcement. This week I saw a chart about bias within major news organisations: both CNN and USA Today were labelled as 'sensational or clickbait'. I've repeatedly read about scientists who were prompted by journalists towards making a controversial or sensational quote, which if published would distort their work but provide a juicy headline. It seems that limiting hyperbole is a critical skill for any scientist being interviewed.

Journalists don't owe invertebrate paleontologists, for example, a free lunch but there is a lot of good professional and occasionally amateur science being conducted away from the spotlight. Concentrating on the more controversial areas of research does little to improve science in the public's eye. Even reporting of such abstract (but mega-budget) experiments as the Large Hadron Collider seems to be based around headlines about 'The God Particle' (nearly six million results on Google) A.K.A. Higgs Boson (less than two million results). Next thing, they'll be nicknaming the LHC ‘The Hammer of Thor' or something equally cretinous. Although come to think of it…

The World Wide Web is far worse than printed news, with shock headlines ('It Was The Most XXX Ever Found - "It Blew My Mind," Expert Says') and over-inflated summaries that would make even lowbrow tabloids blush. Even specialist periodicals are not immune to the syndrome, with New Scientist magazine being particularly at fault. In 2009 it published the silly headline 'Darwin was wrong' which drew the ire of many biologists whilst providing a new form of ammunition for creationists. In 2012 their special 'The God Issue' turned out to contain less than fifteen pages on religion - but then it is meant to be a popular science periodical! In this vein the Ig Nobels seem to get more attention than the Nobel Prizes as journalists look for a quirky man-bites-dog angle to convince the public that a science story is worth reading.

3) Talking of which, journalists want to reach the widest possible audience and therefore looking for human angle is a prominent way to lure in readers. The two most recent Brian Cox television documentary series, Human Universe and Forces of Nature have concentrated on stories around families and children, with the science elements being interwoven almost effortlessly into the narrative.

In print and digital formats this bias means that the focus is frequently on articles that might directly affect humanity, especially medical, agricultural and environmental stories. This puts an unbalanced emphasis on certain areas of science and technology, leaving other specialisations largely unreported. This might not appear bad in itself, but lack of visibility can cause difficulties when it comes to maintaining public funding or attracting private philanthropy for less commercial and/or more theoretical science projects.

Another method used to make science more palatable is to concentrate on individual geniuses rather than team efforts. I assume only a very small proportion of the public know that theoretical physicists do their best work before they are thirty years old, yet the seventy-five year old Stephen Hawking (whose name is now a trademark, no less) is quoted almost every week as if he were Moses. He's well worth listening to but even so, Professor Hawking seems have become a spokesperson for almost any aspect of science the media want a quote on.

4) With competition tougher than ever thanks to social media and smartphone photography, journalists face ever tighter deadlines to publish before anyone else. This can obviously lead to a drop in accuracy, with even basic fact-checking sometimes lacking. For example, a year or two ago I sent a tweet to the British paleopathologist and presenter Dr Alice Roberts that the BBC Science and Environment News web page stated humans were descended from chimpanzees! She must have contacted them fairly rapidly as the content was corrected soon after, but if even the BBC can make such basic blunders, what hope is there for less reputable news-gathering sources? As with much of contemporary business, the mentality seems to be to get something into market as quick as possible and if it happens to be a smartphone that frequently catches fire, we'll deal with that one later. The Samsung Galaxy Note 7's recent debacle is the gadget equivalent of the BBC error: beating the opposition takes precedence over exactitude.

It's one to thing to define science as striving towards more accurate descriptions of aspects of reality rather than being a series of set-in-stone commandments, but publishing incorrect details for basic, well-established facts can only generate mistrust of journalists by both scientific professionals and members of the public who discover the mistake. Surely there's time for a little cross-checking with reference books and/or websites in order to prevent the majority of these howlers? Having said that, I find it scary that a major media organisation can commit such blunders. I wonder what the outcry would be if the BBC's Entertainment and Arts News page claimed that Jane Austen wrote Hamlet?

5) Finally, there's another explanation that has less to do with the science journalists themselves and more with what constitutes newsworthy stories. Negativity is the key here, and as such science news is swept along with it. For example, the BBC Science and Environment News web page currently has three articles on climate change and animal extinctions, an expensive project technology failure, earthquake news and a pharmaceutical story. Like a lot of political reports, those concerning STEM subjects concentrate on the bad side of the fence. Unfortunately, the dog-bites-man ordinariness of, for example ‘Project X succeeds in finding something interesting' usually precludes it from being deemed media-worthy. The ethos seems to be either find a unique angle or publish something pessimistic.

One tried and tested method to capture attention is to concentrate on scandal and error: science is just as full of problems as any other aspect of humanity. Of course it is good to examine the failure of high-tech agriculture that led to the UK's BSE 'mad cow' disease outbreaks in the 1980s and 90s, but the widespread dissemination of the supposed link between MMR and autism has caused immense damage around the world, thanks to a single report being unthinkingly conveyed as rock-hard evidence.

Bearing in mind that journalism is meant to turn a profit, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at how misrepresented scientific research can be. It's difficult enough to find the most objective versions of reality, considering all the cognitive bias in these post-truth times. There are no obvious answers as to how to resolve the issue of poor quality science reporting without either delaying publishing and/or employing scientifically-trained staff. The market forces that drive journalism unfortunately mean that STEM stories rarely do science justice and often promote a negative attitude among the rest of mankind. Which is hardly what we need right now!

Thursday 27 October 2016

Murky waters: why is the aquatic ape hypothesis so popular?


Whilst not in the same class as the laughably abysmal Discovery Channel mockumentaries on the likes of mermaids and extant (rather than extinct) megalodon, the recent two-part David Attenborough BBC Radio 4 documentary The Waterside Ape has left me gritting my teeth...grrr.

The programme has confirmed something I suspected from his 2010 BBC television series and associated book, First Life: namely, that the style of his exposition takes priority over the substance of his material. I'll quickly recap on the howler he made in an episode of First Life, ironically one that featured renowned trilobite expert Richard Fortey, albeit in a different sequence. When discussing trilobites, Sir David briefly mentions that they get their name from having three segments from front to rear: head, body and pygidium (tail) - which is totally wrong!

The name is the give-away. Tri-lobe refers to the three segments across the width of the body: a central lobe and two lateral lobes. Many creatures have the head, body and tail segmentation, so it would be far from unique in trilobites. I find this example of incorrect information rather discomforting, especially from someone like Sir David who has been a fan of trilobites since childhood. You have to wonder why experts aren't invited to give BBC science and nature documentaries the once-over before broadcast, just in case any gaffes have got through to the final cut?

The issue then, is that if we non-professionals believe the content espoused by such senior figures in the field of science communication - and if such material goes without basic error-checking from professionals - how is the public to receive a half-decent science education? Of course science isn't a body of knowledge but a toolkit of investigation techniques, but few of the general public have the ability to test hypotheses themselves or access the jargon-filled original scientific papers. So relying on books and media from distinguished communicators is the primary way of increasing our STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) knowledge.

Back to The Waterside Ape. The hypothesis is an old one, dating back to marine biologist - and let's face it, oddball theorist - Sir Alister Hardy's first, unpublished speculations in 1930. However, the idea didn't achieve widespread dissemination until Elaine Morgan began to publicise it in the early 1970's. Otherwise known as a fiction writer, Morgan's output on the aquatic ape hypothesis was originally considered to be a feminist critique rather than particularly serious science, bearing in mind that the author lacks professional training or experience in the field of evolutionary biology.

Whether it is thanks to dissemination via the World Wide Web, her pro-aquatic ape books have become ever more popular over the past twenty years. This is in spite of the ever-increasing number of hominin fossils and sophisticated analytical techniques that have shown little support for the idea. I'm not going to examine the evidence for and against the hypothesis, since that has been done by many others and I'm marginally less qualified to assess it than Elaine Morgan. Instead, I'm more interested in how and why the idea has maintained popular appeal when the general consensus among the specialists is that it is profoundly incorrect.

Could it be that the engaging quality of Morgan's writing obscures a lack of dry (geddit?) analysis upon a subject that could at best be deemed as controversial - and thus fool the general readership as to its validity? Or is there more to it than that? The BBC seem to have maintained an on-going interest in supporting her work over the past two decades.

Indeed, The Waterside Ape is not David Attenborough's first foray into the idea. He made another two-part BBC Radio 4 series called Scars of Evolution back in 2005, which included some of the same interviews as the recent programmes. The BBC and Discovery Channel also collaborated in 1998 on a television documentary favouring the hypothesis called surprisingly enough The Aquatic Ape, albeit without Attenborough's involvement.

A key argument that I'm sure gets public support is that the of a radical - and female - outsider being shunned by the conservative, male-dominated establishment, with Elaine Morgan pitted against the reactionary old guard of palaeontologists, biologists, etc. Her plight has been described in the same vein as meteorologist Alfred Wegener's battle with orthodox geology between the world wars, but in Wegener's case his hypothesis of continental drift lacked a mechanism until plate tectonics was formulated several decades later. As for the aquatic ape, there seems to be a suite of models describing a gamut of ideas, from the uncontroversial speculation of hominins wading for iodine- and Omega-3-rich foodstuffs (promoting brain growth) to human ancestors being Olympic-class ocean swimmers who would feel at home in a Discovery Channel mermaid mockumentary.

We shouldn't ignore the emotive aspects of the hypothesis, which the various programmes have described as a "fascinating idea" that would be "lovely to confirm". Since most people still think of dolphins as innocent, life-saving and cute (when in fact they play brutal cat-and-mouse games with live porpoises) could this be a psychological attempt to salvage something of our own rapacious species?

Elaine Morgan admitted that her first book was a response to her annoyance with the 'killer ape' theories of the 1960's, as espoused in Robert Ardrey's seminal 1961 volume African Genesis. In these post-modern, politically-correct times of gatherers first and hunters second, Raymond Dart and Robert Ardrey's once-influential machismo ape-man has fallen from favour. Unfortunately, the famous Ardrey-influenced Dawn of Man sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey promotes just such a viewpoint, so perhaps it isn't any wonder that supporting a more tranquil aquatic ancestry might appear to be an easy way to bring 21st century sensitivities to a world reeling from constant violence.

Another possible reason for the hypothesis' widespread support is that it relies on what appears to be an impressive accumulation of facts in the Darwinian mould, without recourse to difficult mathematics or sophisticated technical jargon. For those unable to get a clear understanding of major contemporary science (Higgs boson, anyone?) the idea of aquatic ape ancestors is both romantic and easy to digest, if the supporting evidence is taken en masse and the individual alternatives for each biological feature ignored or undeclared.

Clearly, whoever thinks that science is detached from emotion should think again when considering the aquatic/waterside/paddle-boarding ape. Although on the surface a seductive idea, the collection of proofs are selective, inadequate and in some cases just plain wrong. It might be good enough for the sloppy pseudo-scientific archaeology of Graham Hancock and Erich von Daniken, but good science needs rather more to go on. Yes, there are some intriguing nuggets, but as Dr Alice Roberts said in her critique of the recent Attenborough radio series, science is about evidence, not wishful thinking. Unfortunately, the plethora of material contains rather more subtleties than trilobite nomenclature, so I can only sigh again at just how many equally poorly-concocted ideas may be swashing around the world of popular science communication. Come on, Sir David, please read past the romance and dig a bit deeper: the world needs people like you!

Wednesday 1 April 2015

A very Kiwi conspiracy: in search of New Zealand's giant sea serpent

As a young child I probably overdid it on books in the boy's own fantastic facts genre, reading with breathless wonder about giant - and collectively extinct - megafauna such as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. Therefore it's probably not surprising that a few years' later I was captivated by Arthur C. Clarke's 1957 novel The Deep Range, featuring as it does a giant squid and a sea serpent, both very much alive. How seriously Clarke took such cryptozoology is unknown, although he clearly stated he considered it likely that the ocean depths harboured specimens up to twice the size of those known to science.

Of course it's easy to scoff at such notions, bombarded as we are with endless drivel about megalodon and mermaids, both from a myriad of websites and even worse, the docufiction masquerading as fact on allegedly science-themed television channels (I'm talking about you, Discovery!) As Carl Sagan was known to say, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Incidentally, if anyone has seen the clearly Photoshopped image of World War Two U-boats in front of the dorsal and tail fins of a megalodon, the total length of such an animal would be well over thirty metres. Most experts place the maximum length of this long-extinct species under twenty metres, so why do so many fakes over-egg the monster pudding?

I digress. One obvious difference between today and the pre-industrial past is that there used to be myriads of sightings regarding sea monsters of all shapes and sizes, but nowadays there are comparatively few, especially considering the number of vessels at sea today. Whilst there is a vast collection of fakery on the World Wide Web, much of this material appears to have been inspired by the BBC 2003 series Sea Monsters (and the various imitations that have since been broadcast) and the ease with which images can now be realistically manipulated.

As for scientifically-verifiable material of unknown marine giants, there is almost none - colossal squid aside. As Steven Spielberg summed up a quarter century after his canonical UFO movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with all the smartphone cameras about there should be documentary evidence galore. Likewise, enormous marine beasties should now be recorded on an ever-more frequent basis. After all, it's hardly as if giant sea serpents are being fished into extinction! Yet the lack of evidence implies that once again, the human penchant for perceiving patterns where none exist has caused the creation of myths, not the observation of genuine marine megafauna.

At least that's what I thought, until a couple of serendipitous events occurred. Early last year I noticed the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research's second-largest vessel MV Kaharoa docked in Viaduct Harbour in Auckland. It had just returned from a month's research expedition to the Kermadec Islands, about 900 kilometres north-east of New Zealand. What was interesting was that I later found out the Kaharoa had been on an identical trip the previous year, ostensibly to record the condition of the snapper stocks. Yet NIWA usually organises these missions every second year rather than annually. So why was the vessel returning to the Kermadecs a year early? Although a joint venture between France, Scotland and New Zealand, the funding has to originate either with public money or corporate grants. Therefore it's unlikely the decision for a 2014 mission was undertaken lightly.


MV Kaharoa

I'd forgotten this mildly diverting conundrum when many months later I was browsing the NIWA website and came across their Critter of the Week blog. It was fairly late at night and I'll confess to having imbibed several bottles of beer, but I was pretty astounded to see a fairly murky and obviously deep water image containing what appeared to be nothing less than a hairy-maned sea serpent, with a note stating it was estimated to be around  twenty metres in length. I quickly loaded some news channels, including the New Zealand Herald and the BBC's Science and Environment news home page, but without finding any references to such a beast. I then flicked to the main NIWA website, but again didn't come across anything related to the creature. I returned to the Critter of the Week blog, only to find the page was no longer there. How X-Files is that?

Of course I'd forgotten to screenshot the page or download the image, so there was no proof that I hadn't been hallucinating. Did I imagine it or just misinterpret a perfectly normal specimen? Or was the blog temporarily hacked by a nutter or conspiracy theorist, who added a spoof article? As I went through the options and discarded them, it gradually dawned on me that perhaps the Kaharoa's unexpected summer expedition had been organised with one particular purpose in mind: the search for an elusive giant spotted the previous year.

I usually consider myself to be fairly sane, so let's consider the facts in lieu of hard evidence:
  1. NIWA excel at finding new creatures: they have reported 141 species unknown to science within the past three years;
  2. The Kermadecs are home to some very large animals for their type, including oversize oysters, the giant limpet Patella kermadecensis and the amphipod Alicella gigantea, which is ten times the size of most species in the same taxonomic order;
  3. NIWA scientists have been known to comment with surprise on how many deep water species have recently been discovered - even if a specimen hasn't actually been captured - for regions that they have repeatedly studied over some years;
  4. Expeditions are only just starting to explore the region between the depths of 2000 and 8000 metres;
  5. Although the Kermadecs are on the edge of a marine desert, a combination of hot water and minerals upwelling from hydrothermal vents and the seabird guano that provides nutrition for the near-surface phytoplankton, help to kick-start diverse food webs;
  6. There is an increasing quantity of meltwater from the Antarctic ice shelf, which being less dense than seawater may affect the depth of the thermocline, a region of highly variable temperature, which in turn could be altering the ecology of the region;
  7. MV Kaharoa was carrying baited Hadal-landers, ideal for recording deep sea fauna, whereas snapper usually live in the top two hundred metres.

Apart from my own close encounter of the fishy kind, has there been any other recent evidence of what could be termed a giant sea serpent in New Zealand waters? Just possibly. A Google Earth image of Oke Bay in the Bay of Islands shows the wake of something that has been estimated to be around twelve metres long. The wake doesn't fit the diagnostic appearance for great whales or of a boat engine. Therefore could this be proof of sea serpents in the area? I have to say it looks more like an image rendering glitch to me, but then I'm no expert. On the plus side, the most likely candidate for such a creature is the giant oarfish Regalecus glesne, which I discussed in a post five years ago and which authoritative sources suggest can attain a maximum length of eleven metres. So clearly, the Oke Bay image is within the realm of possibility. As for the lack of documentary evidence compared to earlier centuries, could it be that the vast amounts of noise pollution from ship's engines may keep the creatures far from standard shipping lanes?

Where does this leave the Critter of the Week content that so briefly slipped - presumably accidentally - onto the live site? One possible clue that led marine biologists back to the Kermadecs could be the 2012 Te Papa Tongarewa Museum report on a colossal squid dissection, which states that chunks of herring-type flesh were found in its stomach and caecum. The oarfish belongs to the herring family and so it is just possible that titanic struggles between squid and oarfish are occurring in the ocean deep even now. And where better for an expedition to search for an elusive monster without fear of interruption than these relatively remote islands?

Unfortunately this is all surmise, as NIWA have refused to respond to my queries. It may be a long shot, but if anyone has noticed Te Papa taking delivery of a lengthy, narrow cross-section tank, or very large vats of formalin, why not let me know? The truth is out there, somewhere...probably...

Tuesday 18 February 2014

Discovery FM: science programming on the radio

Considering the large amount of trash on satellite TV documentary channels (yes you, Discovery Channel and National Geographic, with your constant stream of gullible, gibbering 'experts' hunting down Bigfoot, UFOs and megalodon), I thought I'd do a bit of research into science programming on that long side-lined medium, radio.

Having grown up with BBC Radio in the UK I've always listened to a variety of documentaries, particularly on Radio Four. Although I now live in New Zealand one of the joys of the internet is the ability to listen to a large number of BBC science and natural history documentaries whenever I want. The BBC Radio website has a Science and Nature section with dozens of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) programmes from latest news shows such as Inside Science and Material World to series with specific subject matter such as the environmental-themed Costing the Earth.

A long-running live broadcast BBC series that covers an eclectic variety of both scientific and humanities subjects is novelist and history writer Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time. Over the past sixteen years distinguished scientific guests have explored numerous STEM topics in almost two hundred episodes. Although much of the science-themed material leans towards historical and biographical aspects, there has also been some interesting examination of contemporary scientific thought. The programme is always worth listening to, not least for Bragg's attempt to understand - or in the case of spectroscopy, pronounce - the complexities under discussion.

One of my other favourites is the humorous and wide-ranging The Infinite Monkey Cage, hosted by comedian Robin Ince and physicist/media star Brian Cox. Each episode features a non-scientist as well as several professionals, the former serving as a touchstone to ensure any technicalities are broken down into public-friendly phrasing. Many of the show's topics are already popular outside of science, such as SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and comparisons of science fiction to fact. The programme is well worth a listen just for the incidental humour: you can almost hear steam coming out of Brian Cox's ears whenever a guest mentions the likes of astrology. Despite having a former career as a professional pop keyboard player, the good professor is well known for his disparaging marks about philosophy and other non-scientific disciplines, cheekily referring to the humanities in one episode as 'colouring in'.

I confess that there are still many episodes I have yet to listen to, although I notice that a fair few of the programme descriptions are similar to topics I would like to discuss in this blog. In fact, an episode from December 2013 entitled "Should We Pander to Pandas?" bares a startling similarity to my post on wildlife conservation from three months earlier! Coincidence, zeitgeist or are the BBC cribbing my ideas? (It wouldn't be the first time, either...)

A final example of an excellent series is the hour-long live talk show The Naked Scientists, covering both topical stories and more general themes. In addition to the programme itself, the related website includes DIY experiments using materials from around the home and an all-embracing forum.

Although consisting of far fewer series, Radio New Zealand also broadcasts a respectable variety of science programming. There are currently thirty or so titles available in the science and factual section on line, including some interesting cross-overs. For instance, back in 2006 the late children's author Margaret Mahy discussed her interest in science and the boundaries between fact and fiction in The Catalogue of the Universe. Thanks to the internet, it isn't just radio stations that supply audio programming either: the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, releases ad-hoc Science Express podcasts. So far I've been very impressed with the range on offer and it's always good to find in-depth discussion on local science stories.

The United States has a decent range of science programmes on various internet streams and the non-profit NPR network, with the related NPR website dividing the material into obvious themes such as the environment, space, energy and health. Most the programmes are very short - as little as three minutes - and often consist of news items, usually accompanied by a good written précis. NPR also distributes Public Radio International's weekly call-in talk show Science Friday, which is extremely popular as a podcast.  The associated website contains videos as well as individual articles from the radio show, although interestingly, the archive search by discipline combines physics and chemistry into one topic but separates nature, biology, and human brain and body, into three separate topics.

Planetary Radio is the Planetary Society's thirty-minute weekly programme related to the organisation's interests, namely astronomy, space exploration and SETI. For any fan of Carl Sagan's - and now Neil deGrasse Tyson's - Cosmos, it's pretty much unmissable.

Talking of which, various scientists now take advantage of podcasting for their own, personal audio channels. A well-known example is deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk, which as the name suggests, frequently concentrates on space-related themes. In addition to the serious stuff, there are interviews with performing artists and their opinion on science and once in a while some brilliant comedy too: the episode earlier this month in which Tyson speaks to God (who admits that amongst other divine frivolities, monkeys and apes were created as something to laugh at and that the universe really is just six thousand or so years old) is absolutely priceless.

Physicist Michio Kaku has gone one further by hosting two weekly shows: the live, three-hour Science Fantastic talk show and the hour-long Exploration. The former's website incorporates an archive of videos, some as might be expected concentrating on futurology, whilst the talk show itself often covers fruity topics verging on pseudoscience. The latter series is generally more serious but the programme is slightly spoilt by the frequent book-plugging and over-use of baroque background music.

The good news is that far from reducing radio the internet has developed a new multi-media approach to traditional broadcasting, with comprehensive archives of material available from a multitude of sources. One thing the US, UK and New Zealand programming has in common is the inclusion of celebrities, especially actors, both to enhance series profile and to keep content within the realm of comprehension by a general audience.

All in all, I'm pleasantly surprised by the variety and quality of audio programming emerging from various nations, as opposed to the pandering to new age, pseudoscientific and plain woolly thinking that frequently passes for science television broadcasting. Even book shops aren't immune: I was recently disappointed to notice that a major New Zealand chain book store had an 'Inspiration' section twice the size of its STEM material. So the next time you see a team of researchers in on a quest for a species of shark that has been extinct for over a million years, why not relax with good old-fashioned, steam-powered radio instead?